Then finally, ultimately, all those acres of green and rotting weed to either side finally opened up, fell away, and there was open water before them, little islands of seaweed drifting about, but nothing like what they had just left.
“Hold onto your hats,” Menhaus said and edged the throttle back, picking up speed and parting those gelid waters.
“Not too fast,” Elizabeth told him. “There’s derelicts out here, too. Lots of things in the water.”
The mist started gathering around them in blankets and sheaths, just impenetrable and boiling and viscid. It was so damp it left a wet sheen on their faces. And George could remember all too well the days spent drifting and rowing through its murky depths. Jesus, he got to thinking, how had they even made it this far?
Night was coming and there was danger in that.
George remembered that the last time night had fallen on them, they had been on the C-130. Then the squid had attacked and then… well, he wasn’t going to think about it. He wasn’t going to think about any of the badness because there was only the here and now and that was enough. He could feel something building in him, same way he’d felt it when they were nearing the ship’s graveyard… a sense of excitement, of anticipation. They were getting near to something. He could really feel it.
And as he felt it, he knew that there was a motion to their little group now, a building psychic energy, a physical momentum and it was carrying them forward to something.
He looked down at the compass.
The needle was still dead, but soon, soon there would be movement. He felt it right down in his belly. He turned away from the wind the boat was creating and lit a cigarette in cupped hands. Looking at Cushing, he smiled and Cushing smiled back and then something happened.
It happened very quickly.
So fast, George could only watch it happen. Speechless, helpless, he saw it, but could do nothing about it. Something dropped down out of the mist, something shiny like fishing line and looped around Cushing’s throat. Like a noose it swung down and took him, yanked him up out of the boat and into the mist. Whether it was the speed of the boat or the strength of whatever sinister puppet master that worked that line, Cushing was gone fast.
In the blink of an eye.
Elizabeth made one wild dive at him, but she was far too late and she went over the side and vanished in the fog.
They heard her scream.
George shouted.
Menhaus brought the boat around, wanting to know what in the hell had happened. But George had no answers. Nothing tangible to even tell him. The running lights on the bow of the cigarette boat illuminated the fog, cut only ten or twelve feet into it.
“Elizabeth!” George called out. “Elizabeth! Elizabeth!”
His voice echoed out through the fog and he thought for one terrifying minute that something out there was mocking his words, but it was just Elizabeth. Menhaus pushed the cigarette boat in the direction of her voice.
There.
They could see her.
Bobbing in that gelatinous, stinking water, looking positively frantic.
And with good reason, George soon saw.
There was something poised above her in the fog, maybe fifteen feet up. Something huge and amorphous and shadowy. Something wriggling and creeping and riding the mists like a moth. But it was no moth, it was no bird, it was something else. He could see a network of those shiny looking threads descending onto Elizabeth and those threads or webs or whatever they were looked alive, looked like they were coiling and looping with a flowing serpentine motion.
Elizabeth screamed one more time as those threads snared her up.
George brought up the flare gun, was going to punch a burning hole through that nightmare, but at the last moment, he hesitated. Hesitated because a form dropped out of the mist, something that looked to be made of drooping gray rags and motheaten shrouds. Something dangling on one of those wires, like a marionette that was dropped down accidentally.
But it was no marionette.
It was Cushing. Only he had been reduced to a skeleton or something quite near one. George saw what he thought was vertebrae, maybe a gleaming knob of rib or femur. A sort of fleshless face. But that was all. Whatever nightmare mockery of a man it had been, it was quickly yanked back up into the mist by that puppet master, that thing floating up there.
Elizabeth was pulled up out of the water, wrapped in those living threads and both George and Menhaus caught a momentary glimpse of something immense and leggy wth gleaming blue-black skin. And that was all they saw, just a suggestion of form and intent, a hint of some immense insect puppeteer. And eyes. George thought maybe he saw a cluster of wet, pink eyes that looked like a dozen slimy tennis balls stuffed in a nylon.
Then Elizabeth was gone.
Maybe it was reflexive action, but George jerked the trigger on the flare gun and it went off with a dull popping. It cut a red path up into the fog overhead like the trail of a tracer bullet. And then it exploded up there with a shower of orange and yellow sparks. Something made a shrieking, squealing sound and George saw that thing scuttling away up into the mist, looking oddly like some bloated and fleshy parachute with two jumpers trailing behind it, Cushing and Elizabeth.
And that was horrible.
But what was maybe a little worse was that in the glow of the descending flare, in its flickering red glare, he could see that there were others up there. Humped things with maybe twenty or thirty legs creeping along some network of webs up in the mist, dancing away from the light.
Cushing’s gone and so is Elizabeth, a voice was telling George, a wild and hysterical voice, just like you’re going to be if you don’t get your ass in gear!
“Bring it around,” George told Menhaus.
Menhaus just stared at him dumbly. “What?”
“Bring this fucker around!”
Menhaus did, gunning the throttle and bringing them around in an arc, creating a surging wake and then pushing them forward into the mist again. George was hoping, praying that they had not gotten turned around. He slid another flare into the gun and waited.
Waited for what came next.
Not letting himself think about what he had just seen or what kind of spiderish monstrosity could spin a floating web up in the mist and make Cushing look like he’d been dunked in a bath of acid in under a minute.
They kept going, pushing on and on.
And then George looked at the compass.
The needle was moving.
31
The needle on the Geiger Counter was moving, too.
It shuddered, fell back, began to move steadily upwards with a lazy sort of roll and Greenberg just watched it, feeling tense but exhilerated. This was it then. No more toying about with mathematical equations on paper, no more speculating on the vagaries of interdimensional physics, no more hiding in lead-lined vaults and coughing up blood and vomiting and watching his hair fall out from radiation poisoning.
This was it.
This was really it.
The thing was coming. Coming for him and there wasn’t a single force born of man, nature, or God that could stop it. Stop this breathing, hissing abomination that could chew through time and space like a maggot through dead meat.
Don’t get emotional and imaginative, Greenberg warned himself. You are an observer, a scientist. Keep that in mind. Do not look at this thing and tremble. Do not let it see your fear.
But it was too late for that and Greenberg damn well knew it. For the Fog-Devil had been smelling his fear for some time know. It had been licking at his brain for weeks, gnawing on his thoughts and sucking the salt from his subconscious with a growing, impossible hunger. Yes, carefully working him and savoring him, unwrapping the candied layers of his psyche and now it had found the creamy, rich nougat at the center… fear. Mindless, mad, human fear and such a thing was a luxury to this Devil of Fogs and anti-space. It had marked Greenberg with its wasting breath, sweetening him up, letting him ripen like a succulent grape on a vine, and now it would claim him.